Leaders trade blame over cartoon furor, deaths - Mideast/N. Africa - MSNBC.com

“Iran and Syria have gone out of their way to inflame sentiments and to use this to their own purposes and the world ought to call them on it,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said at a joint news conference with Israel’s foreign minister.

Asked for proof the two governments sparked violence, Rice’s spokesman Sean McCormack said, “What we have seen in Damascus and Tehran is qualitatively different than we have seen in other places.”

Umm...is Rueters just being funny or what?

Let me answer for the Secretary of State:

We know that Iran and Syria are police states where the government forces are routinely used to quail, disperse if not kill thousands of protestors in the name of protecting their own regimes. Thus, it is not only conceivable, but probable that the same regimes could quail, if they wanted to and were not complicit with, the same acts against embassies and other property and personnel of foreign nations.

Because they did not and because their press, well known not to be bastions of free speech, but controlled by the state, inflamed and sometimes even demanded these actions, we must assume, as any sane government and people would do, that the state is complicit in these activities and responsible for any damage, injury or loss of life that occurs during the commission of these acts.

To believe otherwise is to be a reporter with al-Rueters.

Leaders trade blame over cartoon furor, deaths - Mideast/N. Africa - MSNBC.com